It's starting to look like the end of an era for Ubuntu users as Canonical mull the creation of an ISO that won't fit onto a CDR. The question is, does it matter? Canonical owes at least part of its success with Ubuntu Linux to the unique way that it has been distributed. From the start it has been available as a downloadable ISO image and a free CD, posted at no cost to the user. This was great news for people who wanted to install Linux but did not have the luxury of a decent Internet connection. In a sense, installing via a CDR image has always been like a kind of cache, in that you're moving part of the content that you need onto permanent storage rather than pulling it through the network connection

These are distributions we are talking about. Their primary purpose is to package together various other programs and present them as a working Operating System.

I for one, prefer distros that do not radically rewrite programs without working with the upstream to get the changes changes included. As such, the main responsibility for re factoring/ reducing code size should be the individual projects themselves.